


Particleth of Magic

by coldhope



Series: discstuck drabbles [5]
Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Homestuck
Genre: Gen, boring stibbons lecture is boring, discstuck crossover ficlets, particle metaphysics, yes i have given this too much thought
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-27
Updated: 2012-03-27
Packaged: 2017-11-02 14:34:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/370059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Thin places?” you ask. You wish not for the first time that somebody <i>else</i> could’ve been the Maid of Time, this is not your greatest love. Your greatest love is archaeology, or perhaps more accurately tomb-raiding, dammit.</p>
<p>“Er, yes, you could phrase it like that. They correspond with particularly magical or spiritual locations, a lot of the thin places are up in the Ramtops, that’s lousy with magic. The University sits right on top of another one, but we aren’t sure--even now we aren’t sure--whether the founders built it on a hotspot of magical potential or if it became one because of all the....”</p>
<p>“Shenanigans?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Particleth of Magic

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so I'm cribbing most of this off the model of quantifiable magic I've been working on for some time on my own, but using Pratchett's names for the quanta/particles. It probably doesn't make as much sense in real life as it does in my head. 
> 
> Sollux really likes saying "thaumic."

“Right, so, look.” Ponder Stibbons pushes his glasses up on his nose and starts to draw on the chalkboard with rapid twitchy little gestures. You and Sollux and Equius watch, not sure when he plans to start making sense. You’re sitting around a table and you feel like you’re back in school.

What appears on the board is sort of like that dense, sweet honey-nut-pastry-layer thing you used to like when you were a wriggler, layer upon layer upon layer of thin surfaces with interstices between them varying in thickness. “These are planes of existence. Reality. The two terms are interchangeable for the purposes of this discussion. As you can see there are places where two planes intersect with one another, which can also be considered to be loci of attenuated reality for either of the planes involved.”

“Thin places?” you ask. You wish not for the first time that somebody _else_ could’ve been the Maid of Time, this is not your greatest love. Your greatest love is archaeology, or perhaps more accurately tomb-raiding, dammit.

“Er, yes, you could phrase it like that. They correspond with particularly magical or spiritual locations, a lot of the thin places are up in the Ramtops, that’s lousy with magic. The University sits right on top of another one, but we aren’t sure--even now we aren’t sure--whether the founders built it on a hotspot of magical potential or if it became one because of all the....”

“Shenanigans?”

“...experimentation that has gone on in this area for the past centuries,” Stibbons finishes, and adjusts his spectacles again. Beside you Sollux laughs his little _ehehehe_ laugh and you try not to join him. Equius shoots you both a look. 

“Okay, but tell us about the individual planes, why do they exist separately from one another?” he asks. 

“Very good question!” Stibbons brightens. “As I said they are planes of existence. We are here--” he taps the blackboard--”on the Prime Material plane, right, and this one directly above us is prime+1, where nothing much happens except really basic low-grade background thaumic activity; you don’t start getting into ghosts until up in prime+3 and +4, and gods are all the way up here at +8. Eight is an important number here, by the way, in case you hadn’t worked that out by now.”

Vriska had, in fact, worked that out, and you have had it up to your fucking horns with her squealing over how 8wesome it all is. “Gods?”

“Yes, but look, here, you have to understand thaums and resons first.”

Equius has an expression on his face that indicates great thoughtfulness, or possibly indigestion. “You mentioned thaumic activity,” he says.

“I did.” Stibbons turns back to the board and starts drawing again. “This is the thaum, which is the quantum of magic. It’s made up of a number of subthaumic particles called resons, held together by a combination of the weak and strong thaumic forces. We’re still trying to prove it but initial research indicates that the reson itself is a bunch of even tinier particles which have particular qualities affecting the behavior of the thaum, but that’s not really important right now.”

Sollux is drooping in his chair, mismatched eyes half-lidded behind his glasses, and you elbow him in the ribs: this is way over your head too but hopefully the human will start saying something useful shortly. You have a feeling what he’s describing is stuff you already know about but haven’t got words for, which doesn’t really help. 

Also, how the hell do the humans know all this when they’re still running around relying on edged weapons and they don’t even have proper electricity?

“Hex has been invaluable in working out the equations necessary to understand this branch of the magical sciences,” Stibbons remarks, and Sollux--just like that--is paying attention. Right, he’d been fascinated by their antbased computer array. “The point being that everything in the universe is made up of thaums as well as all the other stuff like bones and green wobbly bits and iron and stone and so on, and the behavior of these thaums can both affect and be affected by outside forces. This is why some people are congenital magic-users.”

“Ehehehe, congenital,” Sollux snickers, earning another look from Equius. “Tho wait, what about thtuff like pthionicth? Ith that all thaumic too?”

You can tell he likes saying the word _thaumic_.

“Oh, yes. But like the way your brain can do astonishingly complex spatial calculations in order to be able to catch a thrown ball, for example, without you actually being aware of it, when you exert your mental influence you are doing a lot of very complicated and intricate manipulation without necessarily being aware of that either. For example, try...I don’t know, lifting this chalk.” He opens his narrow palm, fingers smudged with chalkdust and ink, and Sollux quirks an eyebrow at him. A tiny flicker of blue-scarlet energy crackles around the piece of chalk as it hovers in midair a foot or so over Stibbons’ hand.

“Right now,” says the wizard, “you are exerting energy equal to the force of gravity pulling the chalk downward, by shaping the thaumic fields around the chalk itself. If I had some powdered octiron and a slitlamp I could actually show you the field lines moving. The light show we’re not sure about yet but we think it’s something to do with changing resonal states.”

“If I may,” Equius rumbles, “I would suggest it may not be unlike the effect given when charged particles in a medium move faster than the speed of light in that medium, producing a type of shock front in the visible-light portion of the spectrum.”

You stare from him to Sollux and back at the chalk, which abruptly drops back into Stibbons’ hand. “Equius?”

He hunches a little. “I studied physics briefly a long time ago before devoting myself to robotics.”

Stibbons has his head tilted, and then turns back to the chalkboard and starts scribbling equations with a fanatic speed you aren’t used to seeing on a human. You lean over to Sollux. “What is he talking about and why are we not talking about the way to get back through the gribble-hole?”

“I dunno, but man, ED would get thuch a kick out of thith,” he murmurs back. “All thith.... _thienthe_. How come the other wizardth are all like _ooh, thpooky thkullth and candleth and incantationth_ and thith guy ith like particle phythicth?”

“Maybe it’s a generational thing. He doesn’t look anything like as old as the others.”

The human seems to have expended his brief spate of equations and is gathering his composure. “I believe you may have something there, Mr. Zahhak. We will have to explore that avenue of inquiry further. --To return to the discussion, however, as I was saying, some individuals are capable of manipulating thaumic fields at will and some are not, all of which is based on what we are calling a resonal signature, the unique pattern of subresonal particles which make up the individual. Mass and velocity and so on have their effect on the Prime Material plane, whereas thaumic forces act on the prime-plus and prime-negative planes." 

You _think_ you might finally see where he’s going with this. “So there’s a pattern associated with how we...messed up the planes?”

“Exactly, Miss Megido. Each incursion--when objects or entities move between planes--leaves a unique signature.” He erases part of the drawing of the plane structure and redraws it to show a lot of layers partly stuck together where something has punched through them. “We think it’s possible with a lot of work and calculation that we can read these signatures from the remaining anomaly in the planes where you came through, and furthermore that we may be able to replicate the exact thaumic circumstances that made your journey possible. If _that_ is the case, then--”

“Then Kanaya and I can maybe haul us back through space and time,” you finish.

“Fantathtic. Why don’t you guyth get thtarted,” says Sollux. “Inthidentally why am I here?”

“I’ll need your help with programming Hex, of course.”

You and Equius both blink a bit at the enormous happy _grin_ on his face. It’s a grin you haven’t seen a lot of just lately and it feels like radiant heat against your skin. You glance over at Equius, and a little of that same smile flickers across his face. 

Okay, so maybe it _was_ worth getting up this absurdly early.


End file.
